2 Answers Found

It would be much better if you contact some persons who are alreadyworking in Urdu. I know a research centre who has taken up the projectof providing Urdu on all levels of computing platforms. As far as I knowtheir work is concentrated on Microsoft technologies (You might haveseen some Urdu support in Windows XP). I don't know if they are workingfor Urdu in Java or for that matter even on Linux. You can visithttp://www.crulp.org for contact info.

Another matter of your ineterest is the keyboard mapping. Well first ofall you should be familiar with Unicode, and that how differentlanguages, even French, German, Arabic. etc. are mapped to keyboard.Most of the Operating Systems provide this functionality, so the Apps donot have to explicitly handle this issue (Like Linux, Windows 200/XP, etc.).

One more problem is the rendering of Urdu font on screen. An openstandard OTF is available for developing extremely complex fonts. Thisstandard supports left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom writingstyles. Also it supports a lot of other features that a TTF font cannoteven dream of accomplishing. As far as I know Java does not have thefull implementation of OTF rendering, and at present it cannot renderall Urdu ligatures. Microsoft also has a better (but not perfect) OTFrenderer (called uniscribe) but it is investing heavily to imrove it.The research centre I mentioned earlier is actually also developing OTFfont for uniscribe so that a much more readable & natural font isavailable as standard in future versions of Windows. It would be a greathelp if the same level of ease would be available on Java platform.

I have done some work in Java with Unicode to produce urdu in one of myapplications... Look, first you should goto www.unicode.org and get the pdfversion of the alphabets of urdu & arabic... then you have the unicode codes forall urdu alphabets...

now, u should know that in order to write any alphabet in a string that ispresent in unicode we write e.g "\uF030" where F030 was the code of a certainalphabet...